Morbid Anatomy by Curran Tim

Author:Curran, Tim
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2013-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

18

The Dugout

When Creel came awake there were hands on him. The hands of men. A shadowy face said, “Easy, mate. We found you out there. We brought you back. Quiet now. There’s Hun patrols about.”

The last thing he could remember were those creeping children, then running, hiding, dragging himself along on his belly, half out of his mind if not all the way. He must’ve went out cold. Something. He could not remember. Only a braying voice—

I want Creel! He’s one of ours…

—he bolted upright, sweating, shaking, feverish. His teeth chattered and a canteen was pressed to his lips. Then a flask of rum. He calmed inch by inch, breathed, smoothed out the wrinkles and unsightly folds like he was an unmade bed. Even in the dimness he knew he was still with the 12th Middlesex, because that was Sergeant Kirk over near the gun slit in the dugout wall, scanning the terrain.

“How’d you get way out here, Creel?”

Burke…oh Jesus, Burke.

“I don’t know. The barrage…everything was torn up…bodies everywhere…I didn’t know which way was which.”

“You’re not alone,” one of the Tommies said.

“Where is this place?”

“It’s a dugout,” Kirk said. “An old cavalry post the Hun overran last winter.”

“How far are we from our lines?”

“Difficult to know,” Kirk said. “I’m afraid the lines have been scrambled. My best guess is we’re a few miles off.”

There were two men with Kirk: Privates Jameson and Howard, both young, both scared, both looking like their mouths were filled with something they could not swallow down. It was near dawn and slowly the dugout began to fill with a soft bluish illumination. The dugout was more or less intact, though the far wall was crumbled as if it had taken a heavy shell. The rest was sandbagged, the brushwood roof heavily timbered. Rubble scattered across the floor, a few rat skeletons in the corner.

“Tonight,” Kirk said. “After dark, we’ll make our move. Until then we’d better sit tight.”

By daylight, Creel peered out the doorway and what he could see was a gutted landscape that could have been anywhere in Flanders. He saw a line of deep-hewn trenches and sandbagged ramparts stretching around the dugout, some of it collapsed, most of it flooded. Beyond the trenchworks was just a flat expanse crated by shell-holes, a few stumps rising up, what looked like the surviving chimney of a stone house in the distance.

Not much else save for a few skeletons rising from the water and a stray skull that was perched atop a trenchknife sank into one of the sandbags like some sort of sentinel.

“We found two Hun last night,” Howard said. “They was skinned. Right down to the muscle.”

Sergeant Kirk shushed him, grumbling about horror stories and nonsense and the slow degradation of the British Army.

Creel had to wonder what other stories Howard knew. Or Jameson. Or Kirk. Because there was no way by this point they hadn’t at least heard things if not necessarily seen them. It seemed unlikely that he himself could have had several encounters with walking dead things and they not a one.

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